Give failure a chance, check out the incredible museum dedicated to tanked innovations

Samuel West is candid. The first product that he sourced for the Museum of Failure turned out to be, well, a dud. "I'd ordered the Harley Davidson cologne online, paying a lot of money for it. When I received the package, a small envelope, it turned out to be a tiny, little sample bottle," chuckles the museum's founder and curator. "I now have the real one at the museum."

Sitting alongside the iconic Harley Davidson branded Eau De Toilette at the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, southern Sweden, are products from such reputed companies as Apple (Newton MessagePad and Pippin), Google (Wave platform and Google Glass), Sony (Betamax), Amazon (Fire), Coca-Cola (Blak and Coke II), Lego (Technic Fiber Optic), Kodak (digital camera DC-40) and Colgate (beef lasagne – yes, beef lasagne!). It might seem perplexing to find products and services from the stables of some of the best-known brands and behemoths huddled under a tag that is corporate anathema, but that's precisely what the museum aims to celebrate.

"Companies' and governments' fear of failure or being associated with failure makes it impossible for them to learn from the setbacks. The museum's mission is to convey that in order to not bungle up, again and again, we have to pay attention to our failures," says the 43-year-old. "Scientific literature is very clear that there is much more to be learnt from failure than from success."

The fall down...

Failure, explains West, is a deviation from the expected and/or desired result. For instance, when it was announced in 2001, the makers of Segway wanted it to reach 1 billion in sales quicker than any other product in history. "Its makers wanted the Segway to be to the car what the car was to the horse wagon," says West, a doctorate in organisational psychology. "Segway represents organisational failure. Despite its hefty price tag, the personal transporter has turned out to be a stupid little toy."

A similar fate met Nokia's N-Gage model, which sought to combine mobile telephony with gaming but ended up as a clunky device for both needs. Another disastrous product, masquerading as a beauty product, is the self-explanatory Rejuvenique Electrical Facial Mask — an innovation that ditched common sense at the altar of vanity. The museum's oldest exhibit is a 1940s medical instrument called orbitoclast used for "a very, very popular neurosurgery called a lobotomy in psychiatric patients. The tool punched a hole in the person's skull, behind the eye, and destroyed the front part of the brain", according to West.

He points out that companies accelerate their path to rock-bottom when marketing teams hype a new product as the next big thing and then fail to meet expectations. "Hyping up sets up a huge risk of failure. It's about finding a balance between promoting, marketing and then delivering."

...makes for tough lessons

A failure to learn may well be because of a prestige issue, macho leadership style or the inability of a product team to challenge leadership or voice a contrary opinion. West points out that the aviation industry is a great example of learning from failure. "When an airplane crashes, they don't say, 'Oh foul weather, too bad.' They go deeper and do a thorough investigation. They don't just accept the first best answer," he says, and points to Sony's experience with the Betamax. "Sony failed because they didn't license the technology to other manufacturers. They also didn't form alliances with the entertainment industry. The competition, VHS, had more films than Betamax did, and they used that to their strategic advantage. But later, when Sony launched the compact disc, it first bought CBS Records to ensure that when the CD hits the market, they have a lot of music to put on them.

And the CD is a huge success story."

Hitting a home run

West, who has been collecting failed products for the last two years, started actively doing so last year after he had a eureka moment at the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. "That's when I realised that I could convey the abstract notion of learning from failure with physical products and items in a museum." Supported by Sweden's innovation agency Vinnova, the 500sqm Museum of Failure will open to the public on June 7.

While it currently has 70 exhibits — innovative products and services, there are none from South America, Africa, China or India. "I'd love to have failed innovations from all these places to have a more geographically representative collection," he says. "It's not strange that most products have come from the US, northern Europe, the UK or Japan. Historically, these are the places where most innovation has occurred. I hope your readers (in India) send me suggestions."

Ask if the museum would put Helsingborg on the tourist map and pat comes the reply: "Am worried about the Museum of Failure being a failure because it's gotten so much global attention that expectations are very high! It's a risk!"